webexpedition18 » webexpedition18 | Web and Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorialshttp://webexpedition18.com
web design, tutorials, photoshop tutorials, jquery tutorials, wordpress tutorials, design, inspiration, design trendsTue, 15 Jul 2014 19:14:48 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.3webexpedition18comhttps://feedburner.google.comHow to Build a Drop Shipping Business That’s Successfulhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webexpedition18com/~3/-SpUKZLpGKA/
http://webexpedition18.com/articles/how-to-build-a-drop-shipping-business-thats-successful/#commentsSun, 04 May 2014 11:58:13 +0000http://webexpedition18.com/?p=17414$1.5 trillion. If you’ve wanted to start your own successful eCommerce business, now is the perfect time to enter the market. With consumers heading to the Internet to do their shopping in record numbers, the right online store front and a solid plan will let you cash in on the expected 20.1 percent growth in the eCommerce market this year.
If you’re ready to start an eCommerce business but don’t have the money or space for the inventory that you would be required to keep, you may want to consider an ecommerce drop shipping business. The use of drop shipping to satisfy demand among eCommerce retailers has been one of the main advantages of doing business on the Internet explains Jeremy Hanks, co-founder and CEO of Dropship.com. With a drop shipping business, you still design and develop a fully functioning website, but you don’t keep the inventory for it at your physical location. You essentially become the middleman between the supplier of the product and the consumers.
The best part of starting an online drop shipping business is that you don’t have to stock the items you are selling on your site. You simply have to post the images of the products online and contact the supplier when a customer orders a product. This also makes it easy to conduct business from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. Finally, the initial startup costs are minimal, meaning you don’t have to take out a second mortgage on your house just to open the doors on your virtual storefront.]]>Tweet

This year, the global business-to-consumer eCommerce sales are expected to reach $1.5 trillion. If you’ve wanted to start your own successful eCommerce business, now is the perfect time to enter the market. With consumers heading to the Internet to do their shopping in record numbers, the right online store front and a solid plan will let you cash in on the expected 20.1 percent growth in the eCommerce market this year.

If you’re ready to start an eCommerce business but don’t have the money or space for the inventory that you would be required to keep, you may want to consider an ecommerce drop shipping business. The use of drop shipping to satisfy demand among eCommerce retailers has been one of the main advantages of doing business on the Internet explains Jeremy Hanks, co-founder and CEO of Dropship.com. With a drop shipping business, you still design and develop a fully functioning website, but you don’t keep the inventory for it at your physical location. You essentially become the middleman between the supplier of the product and the consumers.

The best part of starting an online drop shipping business is that you don’t have to stock the items you are selling on your site. You simply have to post the images of the products online and contact the supplier when a customer orders a product. This also makes it easy to conduct business from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. Finally, the initial startup costs are minimal, meaning you don’t have to take out a second mortgage on your house just to open the doors on your virtual storefront.Designing Your ECommerce Site

When it comes to starting a drop shipping business, you’ll still be designing and developing an eCommerce storefront, just like you would if you were starting an online business selling your own products or service. For this, you will need to decide on the best eCommerce platform for your business. There are a number of great eCommerce platforms to choose from that are inexpensive and provide you with a ton of great looking site templates to get you started with designing your site.

Once you’ve landed on the right platform for your business, you’ll want to find a template that you can customize to give your visitors the best opportunity to view the products that you’ll be selling. When it comes to running a drop shipping business, you don’t have to let your customers know that you won’t personally be shipping the products from your business location. The best thing to do is design your site to look like you will personally ship all of the products you are offering.

Setting up Your Product Pages

The main reason for starting an eCommerce business is to sell products online. Keeping that in mind, you want to make sure you display your products in a way that will make your customers believe that they have to have the product. Your page layout becomes very important when running a drop ship site and the information contained on each page should answer your potential customer’s objections about buying product from you. Here are some things that you should consider including on your product pages.

A high-quality image of the product

A great description of the product

Technical specifications

User reviews and ratings

What’s included in the product box

Warranty information

The more information that you can put on your product pages, the better off you will be. Since consumers aren’t able to touch, feel or hold the products, you want to make sure you provide them with everything they need to make an informed decision and not end up returning items because the items weren’t what they expected.

Verifying Orders

When it comes to having someone else take over the shipping of the products that you are selling on your eCommerce site, it is extremely important that you stay on top of every order that comes in. You have to make sure that you have a really good relationship established with the wholesaler that you are doing business with in order to make your online drop shipping business a success. Every time a customer places an order through your site, you need to run through it and place the order with your supplier. Depending on the supplier that you have a contract with, you may have to call the order in, fax the order over, or enter the order online. With any of these methods, you want to check and double check that you give them all of the correct information to avoid any issues with the product being delivered to your customer because if something happens, it isn’t the supplier that will have to deal with an angry customer, it will be you.

Turning to suppliers to ship products directly to your customers can be a good alternative for those that don’t have the money or space to keep large inventory supplies on hand for their eCommerce business. Running a successful drop shipping business will not only increase your revenue stream, but it will also free you up to focus on marketing and promoting your business without being burdened by having to physically track your inventory.

]]>http://webexpedition18.com/articles/how-to-build-a-drop-shipping-business-thats-successful/feed/0http://webexpedition18.com/articles/how-to-build-a-drop-shipping-business-thats-successful/Tips to Create a Killer Executive Summaryhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webexpedition18com/~3/mNg9R_6XCsQ/
http://webexpedition18.com/articles/tips-to-create-a-killer-executive-summary/#commentsWed, 05 Mar 2014 13:25:03 +0000http://webexpedition18.com/?p=17407successfully written a killer business plan’s executive summary. To make sure your business plan doesn’t end up in the trash, there are a few simple steps you can take to make your executive summary stand out and get potential investors to say yes.]]>Tweet

Writing a business plan is not an easy task. It takes a lot of time and effort to get it right. When it comes to the executive summary, it is the most important part of the business plan. It is the first thing that is read by investors, and it is the part of the plan that gets potential investors to decide whether or not they want to provide you with the funding to get your business started or to help it grow.
Investors are flooded with business plans every day. They rely on the executive summary to tell them which business plans they should continue to read and which plans they should pass on. If a potential investor reads through your summary and wants to continue through the rest of your business plan, then you’ve successfully written a killer business plan’s executive summary. To make sure your business plan doesn’t end up in the trash, there are a few simple steps you can take to make your executive summary stand out and get potential investors to say yes.Cover Your Bases
Your executive summary is meant to outline the remainder of your business plan. There are a few important questions that you need to answer in your executive summary to make sure investors sit up and take notice. First, clearly define the type of business you are in. This needs to be as detailed as possible. You also need to include information on the market size and what the market needs. This will take some research on your part, but is necessary so you and your investors know exactly what kind of competition your business will be up against, as well as whether or not your business will be able to sustain current market conditions.Simplicity is the Key
The executive summary is not the time for wordiness. It needs to be written in a way so any investor can understand what your business is about and what the rest of your business plan entails. Using plain language and keeping details about your business to two to three sentences will help to get your point across. Tim Berry, the founder of Palo Alto software, warns that investors and lenders expect a concise and focused plan. You want your executive summary to be the section that gives investors a basic understanding of what you want your business to be.Make the Logic Flow
Just like your business plan, your executive summary needs to be presented in a logical manner so it flows. You need to show investors why the team you’ve chosen for your management is the logical choice and why the marketing plan you’ve chosen will work for your specific business. If your choices aren’t logical, they may raise some red flags and cause investors to move on to another business plan while yours ends up in an investor’s slush pile.
Your executive summary is meant to grab the attention of investors, it is not meant to put them to sleep. A clear, concise, controlled introduction to your business is much better than a rambling data dump. Make sure you cover all of your bases, keep it simple, and keep the information logical. To give you the best possible chance of securing funding for your business, take your time in forming the best executive summary you can. For the best chance to put your best foot forward, write the executive summary last so you can have all of your ducks in a row and have all of the information you need to create a winning executive summary.

]]>http://webexpedition18.com/articles/tips-to-create-a-killer-executive-summary/feed/0http://webexpedition18.com/articles/tips-to-create-a-killer-executive-summary/40K Professional Designers uniting in The 2014 Web Design Revolution Led By Webydo, Will You Be One of Them? (sponsored)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webexpedition18com/~3/oUZb4dXi6xc/
http://webexpedition18.com/sponsored/40k-professional-designers-uniting-in-the-2014-web-design-revolution-led-by-webydo-will-you-be-one-of-them-sponsored/#commentsWed, 29 Jan 2014 16:07:52 +0000http://webexpedition18.com/?p=17392Webydo ‘s mission is to provide a quality B2B platform that puts professional designers in the driver’s seat, giving them complete control over their projects and designs. By providing an affordable platform with intuitive design features, already more 100K websites have been published to date, and the momentum of this new era for web designers to step up to the plate has been began. Now, it’s possible to design, publish and manage pixel perfect websites from start to finish, while at the same time eliminating the idea having to write code or hire a developer to do the work for you.

If you are a professional designer and searching for creative freedom and haven’t heard of the platform that has already over 40K creative like yourself, than allows us to introduce you to Webydo. Webydo ‘s mission is to provide a quality B2B platform that puts professional designers in the driver’s seat, giving them complete control over their projects and designs. By providing an affordable platform with intuitive design features, already more 100K websites have been published to date, and the momentum of this new era for web designers to step up to the plate has been began. Now, it’s possible to design, publish and manage pixel perfect websites from start to finish, while at the same time eliminating the idea having to write code or hire a developer to do the work for you.

Webydo’s system generates a W3C validated code in the background while the designer is staying focused at the task at hand. You can insert images, write headlines, adjust the opacity, etc. and everything gets converted into HTML/CSS code automatically.

You can then publish the website and give your clients a CMS (Content Management System) permission to add & edit content without worry them interfering with the design elements.

Below, I will discuss some of the important features that set this website creator

Articles

Webydo allows you to create repetitive based elements like blog posts, collections of products, RSS feeds, etc. Your clients can add and update new articles by using the CMS without interfering or tampering with the overall design of the website. All new posts will follow the same pattern of design as the earlier posts. This consistency of website design is very important to project a nice and unique overall look and feel of the website.

Drag and drop feature

As I said, Webydo is all set to give full control to the designers, in other words, Webydo giving the power of design to those who have little or no coding proficiency. Webydo has made professional website creation a doable and intuitive task for these creative professionals.

This drag and drop feature is one such feature that helps designers create websites with ease. You just have to drag elements here and there and drop them wherever you want them to appear on the webpage and that will do.

Hundreds of web fonts

Webydo hosts hundreds of free open-source fonts that are carefully designed for the web. This was done to make sure that you get accurate typography so that you can project your clients’ sites in your desired look and feel. Believe it or not which fonts you use will play an important role in making or breaking your online reputation. If you are using cursive fonts on a business site you can be sure of not being taken seriously.

WYSIWYG

The abbreviation in the sub head stands for What You See Is What You Get. Webydo offers the feature that you will really get what you will see or design. It will never be that you see a different look and feel when you design and you get something different when you publish, as is the case with some other site designing platforms.

SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of techniques that website owners use to rank higher in search engines. There are many methods to achieve that and many tools exist to help you optimize better. Webydo comes with many in-built tools to help you in your rankings. You don’t need to be a professional webmaster to use them. They are simple to use and powerful and effective in results.

The image below shows screenshots of a website which was created with Webydo.

40K Expert Designers that created more than 100k website for their clients

Webydo is not just helping designers create professional websites, but also leading a rapidly growing 40k designer’s community. What does this mean exactly? On Webydo’s Participate forum, designers can submit new features suggestions, vote suggestions there and actually watch as the Webydo team creates and rolls out these new features based on their community’s suggestions. It important for creative professionals to be able to manage their projects, clients and freelance work with ease, which is why Webydo created their platform in this manner.

In addition, Webydo, prides themselves on their 24/7 customer support and satisfaction by always putting the designer first.

I think I have given you enough reasons to try this rapidly growing website builder that is leading the web design revolution.

Go and check the site out for yourself and let me know what you think in the comments below.

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http://webexpedition18.com/sponsored/40k-professional-designers-uniting-in-the-2014-web-design-revolution-led-by-webydo-will-you-be-one-of-them-sponsored/feed/0http://webexpedition18.com/sponsored/40k-professional-designers-uniting-in-the-2014-web-design-revolution-led-by-webydo-will-you-be-one-of-them-sponsored/471 Premium Design Resources for Free from InkyDeals.com! (sponsored)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/webexpedition18com/~3/VKckOAWMQh4/
http://webexpedition18.com/articles/471-premium-design-resources-for-free-from-inkydeals-com/#commentsTue, 24 Dec 2013 11:57:40 +0000http://webexpedition18.com/?p=17384Inky Deals is one of the leading deals websites in the design community, with an extended family of more than 300,000 design enthusiasts. It’s the place to go if you want to buy premium resources at unbeatable prices, whether you’re a graphic or web designer, developer, or business owner looking to improve yourself and your work.
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Inky Deals is one of the leading deals websites in the design community, with an extended family of more than 300,000 design enthusiasts. It’s the place to go if you want to buy premium resources at unbeatable prices, whether you’re a graphic or web designer, developer, or business owner looking to improve yourself and your work.

They’re the only deals website who offer a 200% money back guarantee on every product. This means that if you’re not happy with it, you get your money back and you also get to keep the product.

471 Premium Design Resources for Free

Because Inky (the lovable little ink blob and mascot of Inky Deals) and his team enjoy giving back to the community, they’ve created a huge free web design bundle: 471 Premium Design Resources for Free value $519, which you can find exclusively on Inky Deals.

Partners

It contains textures, UI kits, HTML, PSD & WordPress templates, patterns, fonts, courses and much more. Here are their partners who helped them put this great bundle together:

Resources

This bundle has got dozens of good reviews, hundreds of shares and thousands of fans from all over the world. Let’s see what you get by downloading this full pack of resources:

Today we are having a look at 30 beautiful vector wallpapers. The wallpapers you will find in this collection is by no doubt inspiring and mind tickling to look at because of their bright and beautiful colors.

Each and every wallpaper also offers a unique artistic touch, which of course adds a lot to the complete impression. All wallpapers are available in most screen resolutions to make sure you find something suiting your desktop. Once you have found a wallpaper you like, simply click the image and download it.

For potential customers to notice your business, they must have something to remember you by. This is often done with logos. Creativity in a logo design will go a long way in bringing in more clientele. Logos are a big part of the brand identity of your business. Often it is the logo that will stick out and be noticed the most. When designing a logo, you need to create one that will make people notice it and remember it so they can pass the information to others.

Colors and Creativity

Besides hiring a professional to help you with the creative part of your logo, think about the colors you want to use. Colors make a huge difference in what a person feels towards a business. Bold and warm colors like orange, yellow and red tend to excite people and will often pique their curiosity. You can do a lot with warm colors that will make your logo stand out. This isn’t always what you will want, however. There are times when you want people to feel relaxed and comfortable with your business. Logos that contain cool colors like blue and green will give these feeling to people. Creativity in logo designs will need to include taking the colors into consideration.

The Design

You can use your company name in your logo so people will associate the logo directly with the name. Some names don’t really look right on a logo, though. This is when you want to use colors and shapes in the creativity process. Often a certain shape is used for customers to remember a certain brand. When they see that shape elsewhere, they will often think of your business. This is good for you since they may see shapes all around them that could make them flash back to your logo.
Being creative is necessary to call people to your business. They need something to associate your business to what they need. Once there is an association made, they will be more tempted to do business with you. This is true of logos online or offline.

Where to Use a Logo

Whenever you are advertising your business and want your brand noticed, you can rely on your logo. The more creative you are with your logo, the more people you can draw to it. Online or offline, you will be using your logo to draw people. That means you need a memorable logo that will be noticed but conveys the right feeling. That is why creativity is so important to your logo design. When people make the connection between what they need, the logo and your business, you will begin to see a big improvement in how much traffic you draw. Use your logo on business cards, flyers, online and offline advertisement, on your website and anywhere you think people will see it.

What’s Hot and What’s Not

Since your logo is important to your brand identity, it is important to choose a logo design that will be noticed for many years. You don’t want people to turn away from it or turn the page on your logo without giving it a chance. Often the hot look only lasts for a year. You need to consider the future and what people may be drawn to then, too. Creativity needs to consider what the future is going to hold for your business. This can be done by using your imagination. Remember that you want to draw customers. You want what they will notice. You may like a particular design, but will your customers like it? They are what is important if you want to use your logo to establish more business. Don’t use what is in style if you think that style is going to fade quickly. You need to give people time to take notice of your logo. Eventually, they will know it by heart, and then it will be a household name. You have then established yourself in the eyes of your customers.

Creativity in a logo design is very important to your business. Without using creativity, you will end up with a logo that people will sweep under the rug and be done with. You can be noticed for years to come when you have a logo that has used your creative juices.

I am sure that you do a lot of your purchases online and have your favorite sites that you usually shop on. Now have you ever wondered why you like a particular site and why is it that you don’t really like a site? Why is a particular e-commerce website your favorite and another something that you ask others not to go to?

Apart from the range of products and services a site offers, its brand, the discounts on offer, there are other things that play a role in determining why a shopper falls in love with a particular site. Typically, there are three kinds of sites that a shopper truly loves, and love here stands for ‘enjoys shopping on’.

Websites that are Upfront/Straightforward

If a website wants to sell something, then all a shopper wants is that it doesn’t beat about the bush and just sells what it wants to sell. There is no offering of long winded information about a particular product that is irrelevant to the website’s focus. Product information is provided with a view towards helping shoppers make an informed decision. The use of image and text is such that the shoppers get a clear idea of whether the product is good for them or bad.

Once, they make up their minds to buy a product, they are taken through a payment process that is simple and gets over quickly. It’s not something that goes on and on and asks them to fill up all sorts of information at every step of the way. The idea is to make the shopping experience of the shopper infinitely quicker. Nothing more and definitely nothing less!

As can be imagined, such e-commerce sites are a hot favorite of shoppers.

Websites that have Design Simplicity and Minimalism

Minimalism is in, as far designing a website is concerned and this fact remains true for the shopping carts as well. A person who wants to do some online shopping is not really interested in a site that is visually very impressive. All that he wants is a site that looks credible and professional.

Some of the more successful websites out there are all about the products and services that they sell and nothing else. Their core focus of attention is on whether they are able to present their products in the best possible manner to their target customers. They focus on design clarity, and minimal design so that the core objective of the website that is ‘selling’ shouldn’t lose focus. The attention of the potential customers should only be focused on buying the product and nothing else. This is where design minimalism works best.

Look at a website like Amazon, its design is appreciated for its clarity rather than anything else; the reason why people fall in love for such websites.

Websites that have As Few Call-to-Action Buttons as Possible

Nobody likes to be overwhelmed by sales calls … so why would the use of numerous call-to-action buttons help you reap rich dividends. Sift through the e-commerce websites that are doing well and the others that aren’t doing so. If you look closely enough at the unsuccessful websites, you will find that on every page of their website, they will have design elements exhorting people to buy products. This is called a hard sell, and nobody likes such an overt hard sell. Nobody likes to be constantly told that they need to buy a particular product or service. They want to be able to make their own minds regarding the same.

This is why people don’t like sites that have plenty of call-to-action buttons coming at them. They want a website that allows them to decide in peace, a website that displays all the functionalities and benefits of a particular product and allows them to take a decision in their own time, regarding the same.

They love coming back again and again to such sites!

In Conclusion

Whether you are thinking about having your very own e-commerce solution or you are actually a designer who wants to develop an e-commerce solution for his client, you will need to do the simple things right. What does a buyer want in order to decide whether he/she wants to buy the product in front of him? He wants information in the form of text and images. That’s it. Everything else comes later. He doesn’t want to be impressed by the visuals on the website. All he expects to be given is information that will help him make his mind about the products that he wants to purchase. So just give him that.

Software Development is a quality conscious industry, especially due to the difficulties of running or managing offshore software development. It becomes imperative for software companies to define rigid standards & metrics to comply with.

QMS stands for Quality Management Systems. Quality here implies that the product meets the customer’s specifications while the system itself could be a series of policies and protocols put in place for ensuring effective workflow while dealing with large ticket, custom software development programs.

If these specifications are not documented or quantified properly, there are chances that the customer will refuse the product. That’s bad business since this will mean scrapping the entire project.

Can you see what a waste of time, energy, manpower & other resources this can be? Here are three reasons why you should have a QMS in place:

Without clear objectives, you are a sitting duck

Whether you are looking to develop software by outsourcing it to vendors or whether you are a vendor who’ll eventually develop solutions for your clients, have clear, measurable objectives. On top of the regular business objectives, there are likely to be issues related to legal, cross-functional participation of various teams, and compliance. Quality management solutions best practices start from here.

Bet on Best Practices and trusted Methodologies

Economic backlashes, budget restraints, lack of time, risk related to projects, and the big “quality” debate is a given in technology products development. As vendors, it’s your responsibility to address these shortcomings in the system by going for proven approaches and frameworks for software development such as Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Capability Maturity Model Integration, Agile Development, etc.

Why you may ask? Because any other approach leads to more work on the same project. According to Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, 60 to 80% of all software development is “rework”.
Rework is expensive; additional iterations, recoding, and prolonged projects mean rapidly depleting resource reserves for you.

Put your foot down on Imperfect Specifications

Often, client’s specifications of product requirements are vague. This is because they know the minimum requirements & keep evolving on that as the product gets built. It is absolutely necessary to get a process in place to ask relevant questions so that the development process is clear. Work with clients to get this step right. Collaborate with multiple teams to ensure clarity in specifications. Without knowing the exact requirements, you aren’t developing software. You are building a case for heart-in-mouth complications, wasted resources, and complex management issues.

Add Process Improvement As Value Added

When requirement specifications are jotted down, often project managers & developers tend to miss out on small but crucial information due to the sheer size or scope of the project. If a checklist is made available, the requirement specification process goes smoothly. Apart from serving during the development phase, QMS can help introspect & improve processes. While working on development or implementation, you might hit bottlenecks or find that processes need tweaking – take this up on behalf of the client. Who says there are no cross-sell opportunities in large-scale software development projects?

Work from strength derived from Measurement & Metrics

As a part of the metrics & measurement process, data is collected, quantified & archived as an organizational resource. Data thus collected ensure that developers or project managers are not relying on memory. Once a measurement database has been established, comparisons across projects become possible. Data, however, is not limited to work collaboration, software implementation, beta launch responses, and field reports. Data is everywhere and sticking up your efforts by analyzing metrics helps you perform better and develop software that actually works.

QMS Safeguards Your Business

Sometimes, at project closure, clients may come up with requirements never mentioned previously. Sometimes, they may even state that they are unhappy with the product & do not wish to pay. QMS systems ensure periodic internal & client reviews that have strict documentation rules & regulations. They also specify payment methods & ensure that payment procedures are in place. This re-assures the software development company of documentation they can fall back on for protection. Think of QMS as an insurance policy for the seemingly endless man-hours spent on project development – going out to work without is like going skydiving without a chute.
In order to produce high quality products or services, a Software Development firm must introduce & implement several quality control mechanisms. QMS serves as a method for checks & balances at appropriate checkpoints. The question is: are you using such protocols in your technology business?

What do you think are the best way to approach technology projects or software development programs? What are your thoughts? Please share them here as we’d love to hear what’s on your mind.

Today, we’ll be taking a look at retro logos, a particular area where the style is thriving today. This style of design gives a sense of quality workmanship and is often associated with hand crafted goods or services.
For all of you retro lovers here’s a showcase of the fantastic vintage and retro style logo designs!

CSS frameworks have gone responsive, squeezing content into a spectrum of desktop and mobile browsers with varying degrees of success. There’s already a ton of these things floating around.
Today we are taking a look at responsive CSS Frameworks and Grids that we feel are worth your consideration.

Your Turn to Talk

Choosing a CSS framework is not an easy decision. There may not be one right answer for everyone, there are few wrong answers for everyone.
If you are into grid systems, I’d love to hear your feedback about the frameworks above. Which ones have you tried and what did you think of them? Which is your favorite?